A Study of the Factors Influencing the Presence or Absence of “râ” in the Speech of Persian Speakers

The object marker "râ" has been extensively studied in the realm of Persian speech syntax. It has been posited that this object marker serves various functions, including definiteness marking, specificity marking, topicalization, and discourse management. Given the significance of the object marker "râ" in Persian sentence structure, it has not been thoroughly explored from various semantic theoretical perspectives. As a result, this study addresses this gap by considering different semantic factors and approaches to examine the object marker "râ" in Persian speech.The primary objective of this study is to provide a description and analysis of the factors influencing the presence or absence of "râ" in the Persian language. To achieve this, we hypothesize that the semantic attributes of the direct object, the semantic characteristics of the direct verb, and the extent to which the direct object is affected by the verb are the three principal factors influencing the usage of "râ" in Persian.